The Importance of Being Ernest

19 weeks. My lovely girlfriend is as happy as I have ever known her to be. Even on a rainy day, even when work is a bitch. And by happy I mean round.

But that's not what you want to hear. You want to hear about yesterday's scan. The baby is moving and growing and healthy and correctly shaped without a cleft palate and with a penis. So OM fucken G we are having a boy. Oh, boy.

I feel terribly excited because despite my open-minded, free-thinking, non-identity pushing, anti gender stereoptyping, hippy-femmo-lezo-zen-tofu loving, bong-smoking pretensions, I still can only properly relate to a person when I know what sex she or he is. There it is. I can't even grammatically refer to him or her without being incorrect ("them/they") or long-winded and awkward ("him or her"), or sexist ("him"). Now, I have often been grammatically incorrect, long-winded and awkward and sexist...but surely one must, in this instance, realise the importance of the -albeit borrowed-identity that gender lends one?

I was reading Oscar Wilde last night. He says"one" a lot, in that way. I find it hilarious.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

I am excited and delighted to think there is a boy in there and he will be our son. And he may well be terribly loud and boistrous but hopefully he will read Oscar Wilde a bit, too.

Either way we are going to train him to give us good cuddles by making a velcro suit that my mother thought up and sticking him to us.

We are also seriously researching slings.